Homesteading the Twittersphere

Abundant environments may surprise you: even though they’re lacking in material scarcity or literal friction, there’s still plenty of work to do. It’s just a different kind of work: the work of dealing with complexity, clarity, curation, and especially synthesis. The effort and value being traded here lend themselves far more naturally to a gift cu... See more

It recently occurred to me that the really obvious comparison for what’s going on here is the open source software community back in the 90s. Eric S Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere, a reference text on the social norms and incentive structure of the free software movement, explains exactly what’s going on. We’re no longer dealing with a ... See more

Every day we open up Twitter and can plausibly expect for some gem to show up, like Kevin Kwok on Figma, or Turner Novak on Pinduoduo, and expect to read them for free. In certain slices of the new knowledge economy, particularly in financial analysis or in business strategy, you can get a mediocre product for a price, but the very best products ar... See more

What about paid newsletters? How do they fit into this? Well, we’re lucky to be able to watch a natural experiment play out. Will paid newsletters outcompete gift culture? I guess we’ll find out. This might be the first time we can directly observe and measure the two against each other in direct competition! So watch carefully.